The Labyrinthian Valley

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. The hope, of course, was that there would be today. It was a stretch, but there were still some living dragons, and the two companions had traveled the Valley for only a day at this point. There was plenty more to search.

“If we do not find a dragon here, it is not the end of the world,” the taller of the two said to the other.

“Of course not. The end of the world was the Most Recent Catastrophe,” the shorter replied. “I wonder how well that name will hold up in the future… Probably poorly, but with any luck, we will be Dead by then. Actually Dead, I mean, not the other kinds.” He reached up and pushed his round spectacles up his snout toward his eyes. As soon as his finger left the frame, they immediately began their descent once more.

“Why are you still here?”

“Pardon?”

“Why are you still here with me? You have wings. You could fly away at any time. You do not need to find something that can fly to take you to the… Place we do not know exists.”

He pushed up his spectacles again and looked at his companion. She was not looking his way, and her hand, as always, was resting on the hilt of her sword. Her shield hung on her back, chipped and splintered, the paint flaking away. She really should replace that at the earliest convenience.

Despite the heat, his membranous, batlike wings were wrapped tightly around his body as they always were when he did not need his hands. It was almost like a cloak made of his own body just below his fluffy, furry collar. The wings were always wrapped around himself, never spread to flap in the wind.

“I would lose my spectacles if I flew.”

“I feel like there is an easy solution to that. That cannot be all there is.”

“I need them to see.”

“Not the point.”

“They are not in front of my eyes when I am flying, then I will never find the Place to Rebuild.”

“I see…”

“Because you do not need spectacles.”

The woman groaned and shook her head, dropping the subject. They trudged onward through the sickly yellow mist lingering in the air. It had not been so thick the previous day, but now it was limiting their visual range to only about fifty feet around. A strong wind blew through the Valley between the mountains, but no matter how fast the mist rushed past them, it never cleared. Violet foliage underfoot crunched with their steps.

Alana picked up her pace and her batlike friend hurried to keep by her side. He wobbled back and forth as he did. Despite spending all his time on the ground, his anatomy simply was not built for terrestrial travel. His large, pointed ears picked up a change in the ambient sound, and he placed a little clawed hand on Alana’s leg. She stopped and looked to him for explanation.

He pointed into the mist, and she shrugged and set off that direction. Any way was just as good as any other, and with all the mist, they would probably need to double back later regardless. She disappeared while he stood and waited.

When she emerged from the nothingness, she announced, “They look dead.”

“What kind of Dead? Old Dead? Post-Dead? New Dead? Real Dead? Actually Dead? You know these are important distinctions. I think I left a couple out… It can be difficult to remember nowadays.”

“If they are not alive, I do not care.”

“Well, that’s an odd condition. What kind of Ali—”

“Do not start with me!”

“Things are not so simple after the Most Recent Catastrophe, and you know it!”

“And I try to forget it every single day!”

His eyebrows furrowed and his long rodent mouth frowned. “You do a poor job of it.”

“Because of you!” She shouted.

“No need to place blame, now.”

The human threw her hands in the air and groaned, saying nothing. They hurried on their way hoping to avoid contact with whoever they had detected. The journey continued in silence for quite a while. There was little to break up the monotony given the impenetrable mist. There were plenty of twists and turns in the Labyrinthian Valley, so under the best of circumstances, they would not be able to see very far, but as it was, no one direction was distinct from any other. At some point, they agreed to find a slope and keep it to their left so that they at least knew for certain they were not walking in circles, but that ended up doing little to keep them oriented when they found themselves circling the same hump between mountains for an indeterminate timespan – indeterminate because Alana insisted her friend not try to determine the answer with any degree of certainty. She said they were better off not knowing.

Part of what made the Labyrinthian Valley so difficult to navigate was the unstable ground. Trees here were twisted and bent in all sorts of shapes as they strained to reach upwards but had their roots and trunks shifted underneath them. It was an old joke, long out of use, about the place that the trees would be much better off getting up and walking away from here, but then, it seemed, many of them had, and people collectively decided not to speak of such things anymore.

Despite her friend’s warning not to drink so much water, Alana sipped from the skin at her hip regularly throughout the day. Sure, there was a small river, more of a stream, really, that ran down the middle of some parts of the valley, but it tended to vanish underground and pop up in other locations, so even that was unreliable at best. Besides that, they needed some way to boil the water to make it safe to drink, but with trees so scarce, there was nothing to burn. The Most Recent Catastrophe was responsible for contaminating the water here, just as it was for ruining most other aspects of life in the world. Before the event, there had been significantly more living creatures – humans, dragons, other sentient species, animals, everything – but from what the two companions could deduce, most life had been wiped out, and the few people they had met in recent times had corroborated the conclusion. Instead, most creatures that roamed the land were some flavor of dead, whether that meant they could pass as living or were obvious corpses, such as skeletons without flesh or internal organs that chose not to lie down and behave like they were properly deceased.

If the Place to Rebuild were real, then it would be a haven for all living people to coalesce and try to make a new society together and find a way to survive in this new version of their world, but Alana was skeptical: how would anyone know of its existence if they had not already been there, and if they had been there, why would they leave just to struggle to find their way back? It did not track. She had said as much to her traveling companion, but he had insisted they not consider that possibility. Besides that, he had been correct to say that before the Most Recent Catastrophe and the Place to Rebuild, humans such as Alana had found his entire species to be little more than pests and certainly not people with whom to travel, so even if it were fake, it had already done them both some good by giving them companionship in the desolate world.

The rodentlike man spoke up again. “Don’t look, but there is a snot behind us.”

“Please stop calling them that.”

“This is the thing you want to be specific about? Fine, we’ll do it your way. Behind us is either a Gastric or Enigmatic Slime; I cannot tell which.”

“That is a very important distinction!”

“I know, which is why I was not going to specify! Without knowing which, our best course of action is to run away fast! Frankly, regardless of which, that is still the best option because there is no reason to put ourselves in needless danger!”

“How much combusting powder do you have left?”

“Not enough for the size of it.”

“What about… anything else?”

“For potentially an Enigmatic Slime? Nothing! Hence the name!”

“Alright, I get your point! Let’s pick it up then! We don’t want it to catch up to us. Maybe it will stop and eat the dead things we found earlier and save us that trouble.”

It was only a few steps when he put his hand on her thigh again.

“Someone approaches,” he hissed.

“Someone alive or dead?”

“Maybe Not Dead?”

Yet another groan ensued. “Capitalized or lowercase?”

“Definitely capitalized.”

“Damn! Why are there so many things around here today? We went all of yesterday without coming across a single other—” She hesitated and glared down at him as she sought the right word. “—Being!”

“I suppose the Labyrinthian Valley is a popular place to get lost. If I were looking for a place to get hopelessly lost for the rest of my existence, it would likely be here.”

With a large slime behind them and something unidentified but likely hostile in front, Alana scooped her friend from the ground and dashed neither of those directions. He was less than half her height and less than fifty pounds, no more difficult to carry than a human child, so she slung him onto her back and was off, crunching through the violet vegetation.

She grumbled as she ran. “Doesn’t even need to be a dragon… I’d take a gryphon. I’d take a big, dumb buzzard at this point if it were large enough to take me away from here!”

“You should conserve your breath. This is inefficient use of your air,” he cautioned.

“If you would just fly, this would not be a problem!”

“But my—”

“Yes, yes! Your damned spectacles!”

He reached a clawed hand down where she could see it and pointed.

“That way! Your voice echoed in a cave or something! We can take shelter there!”

Without replying, she altered their course. By the time she made it to the entrance of the cave, she was panting and bent to use her hands to prop herself up on her knees.

“This… Isn’t… This isn’t working. We need to wait for the mist to pass. For all we know, we could have passed by more than one flying creature and had no idea.”

“We can set up camp here and move on when we can see better,” he agreed. He took her pack from her back and began to set up what little they had. He dug his little hands into their food supplies and licked his pointy teeth. “We have… dry cheese, dried berries, stale bread – oh, with mold! – and a little bit of… Is this meat?” He gnawed on it a bit. “This is just leather. We have cheese that has lost all moisture, dried berries, and stale, moldy bread. A feast.”

Alana leaned against the cave wall and sighed. “It will have to do. Try to divide it to last at least two more days. How much water do you have left?”

They pooled their resources and split what little there was, and before long, they were munching on their meager rations for the afternoon. Outside, the sky grew dark before too long. Before she went to sleep, Alana rolled onto her side to look her friend in the eyes.

“You know, if we run out of food, you are going to have to fly. With or without your spectacles, you will need to find more food for me and for yourself.”

“Let’s not talk about that.”

Alana pushed on. “As a last resort, and I know neither of us want to consider this possibility, you’re going to have to leave—”

“I want to talk about that even less. Don’t say it. I am not leaving you to starve to death.”

“You would rather stay and starve with me? You can fly over the mountains, but we both know that if it comes to that, I will not be able to scale them. They are too steep. I am stuck in this valley, and the only way out is to walk out between mountains, and we do not know where we are.”

“Just go to sleep. We can worry about that if it ever becomes relevant, which it will not because we are going to find a dragon who will happily take us to the Place to Rebuild, and we are going to help all the goodly people left in the world to build a new utopia where we all live in peace the rest of our lives. By the time there are enough people to try to settle other places and the population grows enough that there is such a thing as war again, we will both be long dead, with any luck, Actually Dead. Get some sleep. You need the rest. I will wake you when it is your turn to watch.”

Alana smiled her thanks and rolled onto her back to sleep, trusting he would wake her in the case of danger.

It was sometime later that he shook her gently, and she felt a tiny, furry hand over her mouth. Her first thought was how unpleasant that felt, and she was sure she would somehow end up with a hair under her tongue or something, but she quickly put that aside to consider why he wanted her to be quiet. Feeling his breath in her ear when he whispered gave her chills, but she ignored the feeling.

“This was a terrible idea. I’m sorry.”

She simply looked at him to explain.

“This is not a cave…” He hobbled to where she had leaned her shoulder on the wall before and rubbed away some grime where he could reach. Even in the darkness, she could make out the deep blue of the scale once it had been cleaned. “I don’t know what kind of Dead this is, but I think this is the body of an exceptionally large dragon, and no matter how it was in life, it is likely to not be happy with our being here.”

Alana popped up from the ground. “We need to go!”

She tried to be quiet, genuinely tried. Still, her voice seemed to boom in the quiet and tense night. With a tremendous rumble, the world around them shifted ever so slightly.

“Now might be the time to fly…” she hissed.